When Lucas Samaras was a small boy in Macedonia, his father was the village furrier. "I spent a couple of summers in the business to find out what it was all about," he recalls. "Part of it was to stretch wet skins, fur down, on a board and pin the edges down. Later, when the skin is dry, you remove the pins and the skin is hard." In some ways this fragment of memory suggests the works of art Samaras was to make in adulthood: the pins, the textures, the extreme sensual contrasts (soft hair against the stink of tanning and death), the transformation from moist pliability to crackly parchment.
But today the skin is not an animal's; it is, so to speak, his own. Samaras' retrospective, which opens this week at Manhattan's Whitney Museum, is a singular and fascinating record of anxious self-inspection.
Samaras' physical context is that of American art. He is not a "Greek" artist. He moved to New York in 1948, after a childhood spent in the atmosphere of war and civil war in Greece. He was only eleven and, as he remembers it, a "trembling, mother-clutching neurotic." But in his birthplace, he says, "I built up whatever was necessary for my unconscious. Greece became like my dreams, my sleep. America is what I am when I'm awake. My art is a curious mixture of this." With Samaras the image becomes, almost literally, an "embodiment" of his sense of self and a menacing world; the condition of being in a universe which looks at the same time disjointed, visually exotic, but ultimately perverse.
Boxes figure large in his work; and each box, with its lid and compartments and sliding drawers, is a microcosm. At first one is seduced by the greeny blue, aquarium-like interior of Box 17 (Box C). Then the eye discerns the contents, wavering amid their reflections from the walls: a glass goblet filled with a bouquet not of flowers but of vicious glass shards; a morbified pink foot; a small geometrical plastic construction, reclining like a tiny fakir on a bed of nails.
Samaras' sense of texture is acute, and he uses it to produce visual effects that are almost physically painful. His boxes bristle with pins and blades and wires; a pocket edition of Dante's Divine Comedy gapes and a pair of scissors holding a double-edged Gillette razor snicks out of it; a stuffed bird. Box 55, nestles in a bed composed not of twigs but of thousands upon thousands of sharp glass fragments. The textures, in short, are not to be touched; they are real enough to wound, but they do not pertain to the "real" world. Samaras brings such contradictions to an excruciating pitch by, among other devices, his use of color—brilliant loops and stripes of rainbow-dyed wool, confetti patterns of dots and painted flecks, drawerfuls of costume-jewelry sequins, crusts of rhinestone and glitter.
Some of his boxes are so perverse in their tawdriness that they resemble a makeup case for Medusa. Every object is overloaded to bursting with visual acerbity, mocking the very idea of everyday use. There is no way of using any of the Chair Transformations that Samaras made in 1969-70; one cannot sit on a cage of plastic flowers, or a chair of white formica which, halfway, turns into a mess of varicolored wool, or a seat with a five-inch spike rising from its exact center.